Including production considerations in the early design stages of aircraft structures is challenging. Production information is mostly known by experts and rarely formally documented such that it can be effectively used during the design process. Producibility is mostly considered after completing the design, resulting in increased cost and development time due to the late discovery of production issues. This paper presents a new model, called the Manufacturing Information Model (MIM), which supports the automatic inclusion of production considerations into the design process. The MIM provides a single source of truth and a generic structure to capture and organize production-related information in a product system. Furthermore, it provides compatibility analyses to automatically warn for or exclude infeasible designs. Analysis tools use the information stored within the MIM to calculate the mass, costs, and production rate of the product. To show the functionalities of the MIM, it has been applied to the conceptual design of a wing box at a Tier 1 company. This use case shows how the MIM supports trade-off decisions, as it allows for the identification of trends and the ranking of different manufacturing concepts. Overall, the MIM provides a structured and formal approach to include production information in the conceptual design, improving the decision-making process.

This article proposes a novel approach to support Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) application development based on Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). In this methodology, the related knowledge is captured in a well-structured Systems Modeling Language (SysML) model, instead of (static) documents. The knowledge model is then automatically translated to application (skeleton) code using a model-to-code tool developed in this research. The proposed methodology is applied to a use case at GKN Fokker Elmo for the development of a KBE application to design Electrical Wiring Interconnection Systems (EWIS) architectures for aircraft. The results show that the proposed MBSE approach improves the knowledge acquisition process, reduces the time needed for developing new KBE applications (initial knowledge model and code skeleton) by almost 50%, and enables traceability of requirements within the KBE application and knowledge model. These benefits allow effective project-to-project knowledge transfer while mitigating the black-box effect often experienced by KBE application users. In the next phase of this research, reverse engineering capabilities will also be incorporated to enable code-to-model translation, so as to guarantee the application code and knowledge model synchronization throughout the application's lifetime.